The Globe and Mail reports on the introduction of a bill on sex-selective abortions:
A second abortion-related motion proposed by a backbench Conservative MP could trigger a new debate about the parameters of a woman’s right to choose in Canada.
Andrea Mrozek responds:
The debate is here. It has not been triggered anew, it is simply here. For many of us, it’s been here for a long while. So we all ought to get used to this …
As we editorialized in July, there has never been any ‘social peace’ on abortion, as former prime minister Jean Chretien said in the 2000 election campaign. In July we said:
What remains unexplained by pundits who peddle the charming myth of “social peace” is why a challenge to it would be unwelcome. Surely even our opponents would agree that a healthy democratic discussion is preferable to the (imaginary) decorum such debates would break. And if the so-called “rights” which the social revolutions of the 1960s produced are so vulnerable that they cannot endure any opposition – and these new rights can only be defended by dispensing with all others – then social peace is clearly not worth having.
I also blogged about this back in 2010:
I don’t think that the abortion debate ever went away. The social peace, as Jean Chretien called it, was a combination of media-imposed silence and politically inspired cowardice, but there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who passionately oppose the status quo and polls show the public is deeply divided. In most years, there are more members of pro-life groups in Canada than there are people enrolled in the political parties.
